Karma is the term used by most Eastern philosophies. The Law of Cause and Effect and the Law of Balance (that I have put forth in chapter 2) are simply different and more specific ways of explaining karma.

Many have confused God’s revenge with the karmic Laws of Balance and of Cause and Effect playing out in our lives.

Proponents who say that karma affects our lives suggest that we accrue either good or bad karma by our attitudes and behaviors and that an accumulation of good karma allows for more positive life experiences and that of bad karma will lead to more negative life experiences.

We create good karma through positive, loving, accepting, and life-affirming attitudes and behaviors towards others. In how we deal with our situations at hand. Anyway we connect to or expresse our Onesness.

We create bad karma through negative, harsh, judgmental, and disempowering attitudes and behaviors towards others and how we handle situations.

It is also believed that adding to our bank of good karma can help neutralize the effects of bad karma. And we can clear bad karma by embracing attitudes and actions that deal positively and lovingly with the world around us and our life circumstances.

When people give us a hard time or unpleasant things happen to us, we are often frustrated, angry, or resentful of our circumstances. We feel like a victim or blame God.

But there are many reasons bad things happen to us. We may be inviting these experiences in through what is held in our Life Matrix (definition below). We might be clearing a karmic debt, or simply be caught in the crossfire of bad situations of what others are doing.

We can change what we invite into our sphere as well as clear our karmic debts by how we address current situations and behave towards others and the world.

Whatever is happening in our lives and no matter why, we can clear bad karma or add to our bank of good karma by our attitudes and behaviors surrounding the situation. We need not know why a particular event happened, we just have to deal positively with what presents itself now.

From her Christian perspective, Joyce Meyer says that we “add to our bank of good things to come” by forgiving, being kind, or doing the right thing. This is simply another way of explaining good karma.

However, at some level, we are usually at the cause of our current experiences, and at the deepest level we are also at the cause of what our soul’s journey dictates. Karma is also played out within our many lives through reincarnation. (My article on Reincarnation explains this and our soul’s journey more fully. You can find it here).

If we accumulate bad karma within one lifetime, at some point these debts will have to be cleared. For example, if someone has or is mistreating us, this may have been a current or past-life karmic debt that we incurred. We may have mistreated that person badly in a past life.

If we accumulate good karma in any lifetime, it will be reflected in one of the next ones. If someone is very kind or helpful to us in this lifetime it may be repayment for kindnesses we afforded them, or others, in our past life.

The Laws of Cause and Effect and of Balance are also in effect throughout our soul’s whole journey. Challenges and mistreatments may also be forgiveness lessons we chose to learn this lifetime and the other person may be fulfilling their function in our soul’s life plan.

When we deal with negative situations peacefully, we pay off our karmic debts surrounding the related issues, our vibrational makeup shifts and the issues disappear from our Life Matrix. Otherwise they remain within our emotional make-up and affect our life.

For example, until we address our tendency toward, say neediness, issues that will bring our neediness to the surface will keep showing up in our life.

(Life Matrix: Is the lens through which we see and navigate the world. It holds all our underlying perceptions or misperceptions and all our unconscious influences. It supports what we think we need to be, as well as what we think we need to do to uphold our perceptions, whether real or false.

We all came here in harmony from Oneness, all perfect, to be loved and nourished, and will return one day unconditionally loved—just as we are. In Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching we are told:

Every being in the universe

is an expression of the Tao.

It springs into existence,

unconscious, perfect, free,

takes on a physical body,

lets circumstance complete it.

… … … …

The Tao gives birth to all beings,

nourishes them, maintains them,

cares for them, comforts them, protects them,

takes them back to itself,

creating without possessing,

acting without expecting,

guiding without interfering.(1)

Resolving our conflicts and making peace with our differences and the resulting judgments that stem from these – whether with individuals or groups of people – allows us to move closer to our wholeness, align with our godliness, and encourages us all to embrace the Oneness we all share.

For those of us with issues toward anybody different than us, whether because of race, creed, social status, or sexual preference, we have an opportunity to forgive ourselves for judging and for not seeing them as the masters intended us to see our brothers and sisters, namely, as perfect children of God.

For those of us who are being judged and have or are living with the pain and unfairness of prejudice, we have the opportunity to forgive those who judge, condemn, or create the inequalities we are enduring or have had to endure.

When our beliefs come from the narrow interpretations of scriptural writings, like when they purport that homosexuality is a sin, and we allow those beliefs to override compassion, unconditional love, and full acceptance of others and who they are being, we are not actually practicing our godliness or really adhering to the core message of our belief systems.

This article is an expansion of the section “Homosexuality” in chapter 5, “Relationships” from Your Journey to Peace, Bridging the Gap Between Religion, Spirituality, Psychology, and Science (more info below).

https://yourjourneytopeace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Image-article-tigers-in-white-backgrouond-...-591359__340.jpg340527Rosemaryhttps://yourjourneytopeace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Rosemary-logo.pngRosemary2016-09-30 20:03:072018-08-21 15:29:44The Tao Birthed Us and Looks After Us

We have peace and happiness when we are connected to our True Self. Being connected to our True Self allows us to feel empowered and become our Best Self.

We all have differing personalities, strengths, and weaknesses that are expressed in how we navigate the various aspects of our life, and when connected to our True Self we live in harmony with others – we don’t allow these differences to create conflict.

Many of us became disconnected from our True Self because we developed unconscious influences that created misperceptions about who we truly are, and who others truly are.

These misperceptions are derived from being witness to or from experiences we had within our familial, cultural, or social backgrounds, causing conflict within our beings.

Being under the tutelage of these unconscious influences we react in ways that not only undermine us becoming our Best Self, but also affects our relationships with others. Life becomes more difficult than it could be.

Being disconnected from our True Self we do not feel empowered to create the life we want. We often believe how we behave and our ways of reacting to others or situations are attempts to gain authority over our lives, but sometimes they are feeble attempts to counteract feelings of disempowerment.

Most of us are somewhat disconnected to our True Self. We may feel lonely, depressed, left out, disadvanted, or disemp0wered in someway. So rather than cut each other down we must move towards supporting each other.

Unconscious influences show up in selfish, aggressive, passive, or limiting attitudes, and the behaviors these engender. (They also show up in other ways, such as with dysfunctions and addictions, but I am not addressing those here. I am focusing on every-day attitudes and their behaviors that we can more easily choose to change once we understand them). Below are some examples.

Ambition, Success, Power, Pride, and Greed―are all attitudes that we can fall prey to, but that can easily derail our lives if not kept in check.

Ambition, in and of itself, is not a bad quality. Pure aspirations from our souls’ yearning bring harmony into our beings and ultimately direct us toward fulfilling lives. However, ambition can blind us to realities and distance us from those we love.

Success often follows ambition and makes us feel fulfilled for our efforts. However, we must be wary of the allure of what comes with success and the power it brings with it.

Power brings with it authority, and that responsibility must be handled with honor and integrity―not wielded over others, otherwise we will create disharmony for others, and ultimately, our self.

Pride can prevent us from expanding into all that we can be, as it can cause us to become myopic in our views. It may also erect emotional boundaries that can distance us from others.

Greed sets up limiting vibrations about abundance as it carries an underlying belief in the lack.

All these attitudes can derail our successes or alienate us from others.

Aggressive Behaviors and Attitudes: Control, Manipulation, Criticism, Bullying, and Impatience―are protective devices whose intent is to make us feel powerful, but as they come from a position of weakness they further lower our sense of self-worth.

Control: The most pervasive form of Humanity’s protective devices, control gives us a false sense of power over our lives, as well as on those we attempt to wield it over. Most controllers are quite apt to use other techniques to maintain their sense of power.

Manipulation: A controller often resorts to underhanded, manipulative tactics to influence others or situations to get their own way, either through aggressive or passive-aggressive tactics.

Criticism: Most often recognized immediately as blatant disapproval usually accompanies it, criticism can also be masked as someone claiming to help us see or do something better and in their way.

Bullying: An aggressive approach used by those trying to satisfy their injured self-esteem, bullies attempt to scare or control their victims, often intentionally hurting them. They frequently use escalating tactics.

Impatience: A weakness that stems from a lack of knowing that all is well, the person is often irritated with everyone and everything, usually stemmed from growing up in an atmosphere of agitation, anxiety, intolerance, or criticism.

Passive Attitudes and Behaviors: Helplessness, Victim Mentalities, and Passive-Aggressiveness―come about because of low self-esteem and fear of failure. When we fall prey to using passive attitudes and behaviors to counteract our fears or others’ aggressive tendencies, we are recoiling from our inner power base and its ability to empower us.

Instead of using aggressive techniques to get what we want or lashing out to avoid hurt or pain, our personalities combined with our childhood experiences influence us to react passively to real or imagined onslaughts by turning our emotions inward.

Helplessness usually comes about because we have never been encouraged in life or have been criticized and belittled to such an extent that we have given up trying. Lacking self-confidence, one of the best remedies for helplessness is trying new things.

A few years ago I heard Dennis DeYoung from the band Styx say at one of his concerts that “the reason people like me are doing well and are successful is mostly because we failed and got back up and tried again and again, many, many times,” and that failures are often great classrooms of learning. We have to fight our urge to feel helpless when we fail. .1

Victim mentalities develop when we are ineffective at getting what we want and finding our own empowerment. Feeling frustrated, we may adopt responses whereby we resort to blaming our situations on others or the world.

Passive-aggressiveness occurs when we feel helpless, victimized, or simply lack the self-esteem to speak up for ourselves. To be heard or get what we want we resort to subtle, non-aggressive tactics such as sad or long faces, deep sighs, and silent treatments.

Behaviors that can be Aggressive and/or Passive: Self-Indulgence, Envy/Jealousy, and Defensiveness―are attempts to placate our neediness, which do nothing to increase our self-esteem and thereby keep us in a negative mind-set.

Self-indulgence is the placating of our neediness. This encourages us to feel sorry for ourselves. Wallowing in our own issues keeps us stuck in our problems, and we are blinded to the possibilities of our lives.

Envy and Jealousy keep us in a negative frame of mind because they focus on what we lack, as our minds are filled with what another has. We are then not focusing our attention on how to get what we want, and the vibration of discontent will not invite our desires into our sphere.

Defensiveness comes into play when we are invested in being right, want to make the other feel wrong, or feel the need to protect and uphold our position on the subject at hand.

Limiting Attitudes: Minimalist Tendencies and Small-Mindedness―develop because we feel we are not deserving enough, or believe there is not enough love or goods to go around.

Minimalist tendencies keep us in limitation. They develop because we believe there is not enough of whatever we feel we are lacking, whether love or goods, to go around. Focusing on only what we have at the moment and not entertaining the possibility of having more in the future cuts off our connection to better circumstances, both personally and financially.

Small-mindedness plays out as our focusing mainly on the limited or minute details of events or living instead of on the bigger picture. This holds us to a limited view of life, leaving no room for hope of a future with a wider range of possibilities.

When we operate within limiting attitudes, we develop tunnel vision. When we drop minimalist or small-minded tendencies, our beings can then open up to all the potential the Universe holds for us.

We are either aligned with our True Self, or we are misaligned. A Course in Miracles tells us we are either acting out of love, or out of fear.

All expressions of love make us feel good, encourage and uplift others, and create harmony in our lives.

All expressions of fear, such as anger, revenge, greed, cruelty, etc., may make us feel good in the moment, but act to distrance us from our True Self and ultimately do not serve us.

As our unconscious influences keep us disconnected from our True Self, to find peace within ourselves, empowerment in our lives, and harmony with others we have to override them so that we can rekindle that connection.

We have to break through the barriers of our unconscious influences and their misperceptions, and the attitudes, reactions, and behaviors they engender that keep us disconnected from the love within our True Self.

Self-examination helps us to unearth the causes of any aggressive, passive, and limiting attitudes and behaviors that keep us from being our Best Self and free from conflict with those around us.

However, when looking at our past or current errors in perception of who we truly are and who others are, we must always be on guard against self-condemnation. We must remember: